The most acute division on the right — the one that will give Mitt Romney the most trouble — is not between moderates and hard-core right-wingers, between electability-minded pragmatists and ideologues, or between the Tea Party and the Republican establishment. It is between those Republicans who disagree with Barack Obama, believing his policies to be mistaken, and those who hate Barack Obama, believing him to be wicked. Mitt Romney is the candidate of the former, but is regarded with suspicion, or worse, by the latter. The former group of Republicans would be happy merely to win the presidential election, but the latter are after something more: a national repudiation of President Obama, of his governmental overreach, and of managerial progressivism mainly as practiced by Democrats but also as practiced by Republicans.
It is unlikely that those seeking a national act of electoral penance for having elected Barack Obama are going to get what they are after. For one thing, the number of Americans who believe President Obama to be merely incompetent is far greater than the number of Americans who believe him to be, not to put too fine a point on it, evil. For another, that larger group of voters is, for once, probably right.
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Presidents are cultural lightning rods, the last two more so than many others. This has some weird effects. George W. Bush was hated and loathed by the Democratic base, which is aggressively anti-religious and seeks to impose a liberal cultural homogeneity on the nation (the totems of which are gay marriage, abortion on demand, and the environmental liturgy) to such an extent that even unremarkable initiatives sent them into a panic when they bore the imprimatur of W. President Bush’s office of faith-based initiatives, for example, represented the sort of thing that could easily have been signed into law by Jimmy Carter or Bill Clinton. Far from representing the camel’s nose of Christian theocracy poking under the tent of the First Amendment, the office’s oversight council today includes the president of Seedco, the founder of Asian Indian Women of America, Rabbi David N. Saperstein, the president of Catholic Charities, the head of Big Brothers Big Sisters America, and the director of the Gallup Center for Muslim Studies — an all-American mix, with no Torquemada or Chillingsworth to be found. But because the initiative touches on religious organizations and was brought into being by President Bush, it was greeted in many quarters as though it were a revival of the Salem witch trials. Faith-based initiatives may be a good idea or a bad idea, but the program is not what its most hysterical critics thought it was.
President Obama, for his part, has signed some truly awful pieces of legislation into law: the stimulus package, Cash for Clunkers, and, most notably, Obamacare. Bad as these are, the reaction among some conservatives has been overblown, and I write that as the author of a book that contains the sentence, “Of course Obamacare is socialism.” The president has been described as a budding Hitler, a bush-league Stalin, a saboteur, a revolutionary, etc. But as lamentable as President Obama’s agenda has been, there is not much that is especially remarkable about it. President Obama is not a revolutionary Bolshevik; he is a conventional liberal of a very familiar kind. Obamacare is precisely the same sort of program that a Pres. Al Gore or a Pres. John Kerry might have signed into law. The most remarkable thing about President Obama is that, unlike even the masterly Bill Clinton, he managed to get a big part of the Democrats’ health-care agenda enacted as law. He did this with a major assist from his predecessor, who left him with a much more liberal Congress than might otherwise have been elected.
The dig on Obama is simple: He inherited a country on the brink of Great Depression II and while he prevented another one from taking place, he has not fixed the structural problems in the economy and returned everyone to full employment. Health Care Reform, and other programs did not cause the economic problems nor did they contribute to them.
To get right down to where the rubber meets the road, ALL GOP candidates should be asked this question: If you were elected in 2009, what steps would your administration have taken to recover from the economic mess and how would the economy and employment be different by now?
Your first paragraph is interesting, as it throws light on some competing partisan counterfactuals. Certainly an Obama detractor would frame it the opposite way; that Obama's efforts to prevent a recession instead exacerbated it.
Counterfactuals like these are non-falsifiable, so can't be definitively proven or disproven. I'd suggest though, that the administration's own arguments belie your point of view. For example, the Stimulus was to keep unemployment below 8%, and unemployment has been well above 8% since the Stimulus was passed. Obamacare was supposed to reduce the national debt (as per Peter Orzag), and the debt has climbed to unprecedented levels since its passing. Clash for Clunkers was to increase demand for new cars, and apart from a brief spike and subsequent trough when the program started and ended, new car sales were essentially unaffected.
Your second paragraph contains a fair question. If I were a Republican candidate, I would start my answer by saying, "Here's what I wouldn't do:...," then reading the paragraph I just wrote above.
"Health Care Reform, and other programs did not cause the economic problems nor did they contribute to them."
Did not cause. True. Did not contribute. False. One of the more important reasons that companies aren't hiring is that they are looking at how much labor is going to cost a couple of years from now, because of Obamacare, and they just can't pay it.
You raise some good points, but your assertions that health care reform did not contribute to the past few years of economic problems is just plain wrong.
Unemployment = big problem for our economy.
Health care reform = future requirements for an employer
Employer = afraid to hire until they adequately assess their future obligations proposed by health care reform.
Objectively speaking, while leaving out opinions to either side of HCR, the timing has certainly contributed to economic problems.
The dig on Obama is that he failed to reduce unemployment significantly as he had *promised* to do. Instead, with unemployment continuing to fester, he went off on a tangent and gave Americans a health care program in lieu of another 10 million jobs. A health care program based on a mandate that polls consistently show Americans reject. (And without the mandate, the entire program collapses.)
In short, the dig on Obama where the economy is concerned is remarkably similar to the Left's dig on Bush where the War on Terror was concerned: He underestimated the scope of the job and engaged in efforts that didn't get the main goal accomplished.
The fear that Romney will attempt to simply amend or dismantle Obamacare piecemeal is exactly why conservatives do not support him.
He represents one of conservatives' greatest fears: a Republican whose small-government, entitlement-reform rhetoric will take a backseat once he is the one in charge of it.
Ah yes, the piecemeal approach. Easier said than done (from a political point of view). Outright repeal, I agree, was never an option. The law is just too complex, too deep, touches too many departments, and too many people. Funny, you hear very little about repleal these days from the GOP.
ObamaCare was ingenious. Its implementation is gradual, but deep. HHS is the focal point. And in coming years HHS will have more prestige than DOD or Homeland Security. HHS will also have much more power than most of us realize. But it will not come out all at once. The entire ObamaCare bill is a tangled web of complex agendas, authorities, subsidies, and regulations. I really don't think Mitt (or any of the candidates) have the skills necessary in dismantling it bit-by-bit. And one the other side of the coin, an entire class of people will reap many benefits (and these are not just the poor). A future President will need a substantial political coalition and a very thick backside. The opponents will not just be on K-Street and the MSM, but Main St as well. In the end I fear the GOP will eventually give up and say that the program can be better managed with Republicans in office.
The only thing stopping ObamaCare would be a financial crisis created by our huge unfunded liabilities. Don't look to Mitt or anyone of our other Republicans to fix this.
Yes, but for crying out loud, until we *know* that is the situation we are faced with, can't we make repeal our goal? And can't we ask for a candidate who has that same goal?
All told, though, your column gives alot to think about.
Kevin, what do you do when you DO have the votes, but you don't have a president fired up to make it happen?
You can destroy the thing decisively, or you can pick at it half-heartedly to appease the people who voted for you. If there is another realistic option, I can't think of it.
If you have the votes for repeal and you think that a President Romney will in anyway impede repeal you are not paying attention. If there are big gains in the Senate and Romney wins the Obamacare is repealed. I say this as a Santorum supporter by the way. Not voting for Romney because he won't really repeal Obamacare is just crazy.
I was being snarky in response to Kevin (because he deserved it), but I'm not worried about the scenario where the R-dominated Congress serves up repeal on a silver platter and Romney not going for it.
What happens if you've got 2-3 republicans or maybe 2 Rs and one or two Ds that need to be persuaded to repeal in the senate? Is a president Romney really going to push their buttons to make them repeal? Is Romney going to use the bully pulpit to make it risky for people like Olympia Snowe to play their usual games? Is Romney going to go to battle, pulling Scott Brown behind him kicking and screaming?
Maybe he will. I don't know - and that's what's got me worried. There are other candidates that I don't have to wonder about.
This is quite unlikely. Assuming Republicans don't make a gain of 13 in the Senate, Democrats will be required (not just Republicans). Furthermore, least liberal in the Democratic party will mostly be gone (such as Nelson and Lieberman).
It is quite likely that they will need (at least) 4-5 Democrats to get the 60 votes necessary to repeal the community rating and guaranteed issue regulations (technically a motion include in a reconciliation bill a provision that would violate the Byrd rule). And it is quite unlikely that they will get such votes. Both regulations are immensely popular, even among supermajorities of Republicans, so the liberal Senators remaining after 2012 have no incentive to cooperate.
The problem with dismantling it one piece at a time is that key provisions will undoubtedly remain in place, either because Republicans lose the spine or because they simply believe they can manage it better than the Democrats. The mindset of most conservatives is one of very little faith in Republicans to go the conservative way, and the fear is that Romney would represent that way of governing.
But total repeal should be the goal until it's 100% certain that it's impossible and the clock is ticking. If/when that happens, then, well, I conservatives will have to make the best of an awful situation and consent to going piecemeal.
"And when you discover that you do not have the votes in the Senate to repeal Obamacare, then what do you do?"
Well, first off, you wait until you discover that before you announce Plan B. When campaigning, as when asking for a raise, you go for first for what you want.
I seem to recall that the GOP tried the "announce Plan B" approach this year and guess what, they didn't even get Plan B. They got rolled.
